Atlassian Challenges GitHub to a Fork Fight

You might think of developers as neophiles, always eager to try new tools. But when they find something that works, they often resist switching to something else. They still love building software code with old-school text editors like Vim or Emacs. Many of them still use something called the Concurrent Versions System, or CVS — a quarter-century-old program that helps them keep track of changes to their code.

Scott Farquhar — the co-founder and co-CEO of developer tool company Atlassian — acknowledges that developers are slow to change, but he believes they’re speeding up. It took five to 10 years, he says, for most developers to move from CVS to a code management tool called Subversion, but he’s confident that the latest paradigm for overseeing code revisions — decentralized version control, or DVCS — will spread much quicker.

Old-school code-management systems stored everything on a central server. But DVCS changed this by storing the code on the developer’s PC and then syncing up all the differences over the network. The paradigm first arrived in the form of Git, the second great creation from Linux founder Linus Torvalds, and it was popularized by GitHub, a website that makes the platform easier to use.

But Farquhar says this is only the beginning. He and Atlassian are now offering a Git-based code collaboration and management tool designed specifically for enterprises — i.e., big businesses. It’s called Stash, and on Wednesday, Atlassian is rolling out a new version of the platform that adds more collaboration tools, such as Twitter- and Facebook-style “@ mentions” and finer-grained permission controls.

It’s a direct challenge to GitHub. Earlier this year, GitHub raised a $100 million dollar investment from Andreessen-Horowitz, planning to market a version of GitHub that companies can run on their own servers, behind their own firewalls. But Atlassian has a similar plan.

Back in 2010, Atlassian took a $60 million dollar investment from Accel Partners, and it acquired GitHub competitor Bitbucket shortly thereafter. Soon, Atlassian customers were asking if there was a way they could host their Bitbucket sites behind their firewalls, Farquhar says. That led to an internal debate at Atlassian about whether to repurpose Bitbucket to run on private servers, or to build a new product from the ground up. The company settled on the latter.

With DVCS systems like Git, developers download a copy the entire code repository, and changes are synchronized with the server. That speeds up the process of making changes. But it also changes the way developers work, freeing them to experiment with their own versions — or forks — of the code.

Those new workflows are a big part of what makes developers prefer Git and Mercurial, but changing both the tools you use to do work, and the process for doing work simultaneously can be counter productive. To make the transition easier, the Atlassian team decided to move source code to DVCS repositories first and worry about changing workflows once everything is working.

As a result of this experience, the company built some tools that made it possible to use both Subversion and DVCS at the same time. With that worked out, the company integrated support for Git and Mercurial into all of its own products, from its flagship bug tracking application JIRA to its code review tool Crucible.

Competing with GitHub won’t be easy. GitHub has over 4.5 million repositories. Bitbucket doesn’t disclose how many repositories it hosts, but the number is thought to be much smaller. GitHub has won the hearts and minds of developers, but it hasn’t won over the enterprise.

First of all, there’s the matter of price. While GitHub Enterprise costs $5,000 for 20 seats, Atlassian sells 25 seats for $1,800.

Alex Holtz, a senior software engineer for travel site Orbitz, says that GitHub Enterprise costs too much for the level of service the company is ready to provide. But what really sold Orbitz on Stash was its integration with Atlassian’s existing product line. Before switching to Git, Orbitz used a custom version control system. “Every time we wanted a new tool, we’d spend dozens or hundreds of hours building integration points,” he explains. Although all of Atlassian’s products support Git, the direct integration between JIRA and Stash was appealing.

That could be Atlassian’s secret weapon. The company claims over 23,000 customers, providing a huge client base to sell into. “I don’t think everything we need is in Stash today, but it’s come a long way in the last six months,” Holtz says. “That speaks well of where it will be even three months from now.”

But GitHub is just getting started as well. Watch for this rivalry to grow.

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